Fab Dupont Music Terms Glossary
24min
(21)
Musicians speak many languages. Their native tongue, maybe a few others, music as a language itself, and of course they speak... "musician".
In this pureMix.net exclusive, award winning producer, Fab Dupont, explores the fascinating language musicians have developed over centuries in their natural habitat.
Learn complex terms like "Deep Pockets", "Playing Outside", "Playing Changes", "Block Chords", "Open Voicing" as well as important lifestyle choices like which room you should park the producer and their girlfriend/boyfriend in.
After watching this video, you'll be able to communicate with the hippest of pocket players grooving deep on the back beat out in the live room, and even the sit in players who improvise their riffs in the vamp way outside after the scat singer does the count off at the head of the first standard of your next gig… Ya dig?
Once logged in, you will be able to click on those chapter titles and jump around in the video.
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:48 - Gig
- 01:41 - Play Outside
- 02:37 - Woodshed
- 03:00 - In the pocket
- 04:36 - Groove
- 05:18 - Beat
- 06:21 - Money Beat
- 06:45 - After Beat
- 07:26 - Half Time
- 08:16 - Playing Time
- 08:48 - Live/Dead Room
- 09:24 - Rhythm Changes
- 10:15 - Counting Off
- 10:40 - Pedal
- 11:37 - Chord Tones
- 12:06 - Block Chords
- 13:05 - Open Voicing
- 13:36 - Semitone
- 13:50 - Sit In
- 14:17 - String Quartet
- 14:37 - Scat
- 14:57 - Arrangements
- 15:48 - Improvisation
- 16:29 - Chart
- 16:58 - Top Or Head
- 17:43 - Pick Up
- 18:23 - Fill
- 18:52 - Break
- 19:24 - Breakbeat
- 19:44 - Drop
- 20:26 - Turnaround
- 21:06 - B Section
- 22:07 - Riff
- 22:32 - Lick
- 22:37 - Vamp
- 23:07 - Coda
- 23:24 - Tag
- 23:52 - Trading Fours/Eights
- 24:21 - Tacet
00:00:07
Good morning children,
today we're going to talk about words.
00:00:11
Special words, music words.
00:00:13
Words that people use
but maybe don't really know
what they mean
or words that people use
not knowing that some people
around them don't know what they mean.
00:00:21
Imagine yourself in this
situation, you may have been in,
I know I have been in.
00:00:26
Somebody comes into the studio and says:
'Dude,
let's go to the Live Room
the drummer will play a money beat,
but keep it in the pocket,
easy on the afterbeat,
the bass player will play time,
just play changes.
Who wants to pick a head?'
What do you do?
Good question, let's answer that.
00:00:43
The first I like to use today is one
of the most important ones in a musician's life.
00:00:48
Gig.
00:00:49
What's a gig?
Well, a gig is a gig.
00:00:51
Wait! A gig is a job.
00:00:53
Right!
Musicians call a gig a job.
00:00:56
So, it could be a live gig,
a live gig is when you go play outside.
00:01:01
It could be just a gig.
00:01:02
A gig is anything based in money.
00:01:05
What does that word come from?
Well, there are some
discrepancies about that,
some people say
it comes from a little cart
that black musicians could buy
once they made enough money
to play on the back of
so they would not get arrested
when they play music in the street.
00:01:19
Some other the people say
it comes from the word 'jig'
which is a dance,
also used in the north of Italy.
00:01:25
No matter where it comes from,
a gig is a gig.
00:01:28
It's a job.
00:01:29
It is number one preoccupation
of the working musician.
00:01:32
Not to be confused
with the day gig.
00:01:35
The day gig is the gig that's not a gig,
it's the gig that's during the day
and it's not music.
00:01:41
Let's talk about the expression
Play Outside.
00:01:45
When you hear a musician say:
'Wow, this dude is playing way outside!'
What he is saying is that this
dude is playing, usually improvising,
a bunch of notes that are not inside
the harmonic
content of the said song, say for example:
You're playing 'Alone Together',
which is in D minor,
and you start your pick-up to your solo
and you play
a C sharp minor chord over the
D minor.
00:02:11
That is playing outside.
00:02:12
Now, it's not random playing
or just gibberish.
00:02:16
There's a science to it
and there's a skill to it.
Some people are very good at it.
00:02:20
John Coltrane for example is worth
listening to.
00:02:23
He's not the only one.
00:02:24
There are many many players
who became masters,
and are still masters,
at playing outside.
00:02:29
Mostly in the jazz style.
00:02:31
As far as what we are subjected to
on the radio that's all very much inside,
safe from the rain.
00:02:37
Let's talk about the word
Woodshed.
00:02:39
I have no idea where it came from
but I love the word.
00:02:42
Sometimes you hear it shorten as 'shed'.
00:02:45
As in:
'Oh, that dude has done a lot of shedding'.
00:02:47
He's not losing his skin,
he's just been practicing a lot.
00:02:51
Been in the woodshed means
you're practicing hardcore.
00:02:55
Basically not seeing the light of
the day or the light of your girlfriend
or boyfriend,
depending on what you're into.
00:03:01
Let's talk about 'In the Pocket'.
00:03:03
What does 'in the pocket' mean?
First I'd like to say
that I haven't heard anyone
senseful or adult
saying
'played in the pocket'
or 'playing in the pocket'
or 'he plays in the pocket'.
00:03:15
What I usually hear is:
'He's got a bad-ass pocket'.
00:03:18
Or: 'Ooh, he's a serious pocket player'.
00:03:22
Or: 'This got some deep pockets'.
00:03:25
That's what I hear. Playing in the
pocket is a little bit music schooly.
00:03:29
But what does it mean anyway?
It usually refers to drummers
and it usually means that the groove
is good,
that the drummer is grooving well.
00:03:37
Actually you could
interchange pocket for groove.
00:03:39
'This dudes get a bad pocket'.
00:03:42
Or: 'This dude's got a bad groove'.
00:03:44
Or: 'This is grooving'.
00:03:45
Or: 'This has got a nasty pocket'.
00:03:47
See what I mean? The pocket is
basically when something feels good.
00:03:51
I see a lot of people
asking for players that are
pocket players, drummers,
usually drummers.
00:03:57
And that means that
they're looking for somebody
who's just gonna play a straight beat
and not play any fills,
not play any toms or anything like that.
00:04:05
That is not a pocket player.
00:04:06
I mean, it may be a pocket player,
but what a pocket player really is
is somebody who's gonna make your toe tap
within one bar or one and half bar
and will never deviate.
00:04:16
He may push, he may pull,
those are terms we're gonna see,
he may rush, he may slow down,
a little bit, not a lot.
It's just gonna feel good.
00:04:25
So, who's a good pocket player?
Steve Gadd comes to mind
my friend Graham Hawthorne comes to mind.
00:04:32
Anybody who ever played with the
James Brown Band comes to mind.
00:04:35
Those are pocket players.
00:04:37
Let's talk about
'Groove'.
What is a groove?
It could be two things mainly:
1 - A rhythmic pattern played on
bass and drums, or just drums.
00:04:48
Something that basically is the soul
of the rhythm of the song.
00:04:52
Like for example:
'Dude, what's the groove on this tune?'
I'd say like...
00:04:59
That's the groove played, OK.
00:05:01
So that's a way to communicate a groove,
a rhythm pattern.
00:05:04
It's also a feeling:
'Oh, this is grooving!'
That's more related to the
same thing as 'pocket'.
00:05:10
'Oh, that feels good!'
You know, the groove is a good feel.
00:05:13
And also, there's, you know,
Earth, Wind and Fire:
'Let's groove the night.'
And that means something
completely different.
00:05:18
Let's talk about the words
'beat' and 'money beat'.
00:05:22
First, beat.
00:05:23
What is a beat?
In classic music theory it
means the basic unit of time.
00:05:29
In a 4/4 time there are
4 beats, in a 3/4 bar,
I let you guess.
00:05:35
You've heard of BPM,
beats per minute. 'How many
beats you have per minute?'
'What is the tempo of the song?'
So beat defines the pace
of your composition.
00:05:44
That's the second meaning of beat.
00:05:45
A lot of people think of the beat as
the tempo of the song,
interchangeably.
00:05:50
What's the beat, what's the tempo?
A beat can also be a rhythm,
just like the groove, or a pocket.
00:05:56
I'm meaning...
00:05:58
That's the beat, alright?
And then recently we've been hearing
about 'beat makers'.
00:06:03
That sometimes people
confuse with producers
but a beat maker and a
producer are two separate things
that are not to be confused.
00:06:10
A beat maker is somebody who
owns Ableton Live
and knows how to use the
drum pattern system in it
and make pretty original
and interesting sounding
beats as in rhythm or grooves.
00:06:20
So that's the beat.
00:06:21
What's the 'money beat'?
Money beat is...
00:06:28
Groove
or beat
or pocket
on a drum.
00:06:33
Why is it called the money beat?
It's called the money beat
because it's sold millions of records
by being on those records.
00:06:38
Consequently people think that
the record sold because of the
beat so they call it money beat.
00:06:43
That was beat and money beat.
00:06:45
Let's talk about the word 'After Beat'.
00:06:48
We know about beat,
we know about money beat.
00:06:52
What is After Beat?
After beat is the same as back beat.
00:06:57
Back beat is 2 and 4 in a 4/4
bar on a classic rock groove.
00:07:03
The case 'Ks' are
back beats or after beat.
00:07:06
Why would people call it after beat
instead of calling them back beat
or call them back beat
instead of 2 and 4?
I don't know.
00:07:14
But my first ever encounter
with this description of 2
and 4 was in Paris, France
and the dude said:
'You have to play the after beat!'
And I said:
'Sure!'
Let's talk about the
expression 'Half Time'.
00:07:29
Half time is when a player,
usually the drummer
and the bass player,
because they tend to hang
cut the tempo of the song in half,
for a section, for example:
Say the BPM is 120 and the groove is...
00:07:46
And then the Bridge happens,
the bridge goes in half time.
00:07:49
I'll sing two bars of the chorus
and go in half time.
00:08:00
That's half time.
00:08:01
Just cut the tempo in half.
00:08:03
But everything else in the song
may keep on going at the same tempo.
00:08:06
Or everybody cuts the tempo in half.
00:08:09
Which is why
it's also called cut time.
00:08:12
Half time and cut time
are the same thing.
00:08:15
Should we talk about double time?
Let's talk about the
expression 'playing time'.
00:08:20
This is an expression I hear coming mostly
from bass players as in:
'Hey dude, what are you gonna play here?'
And the bass player says:
'I don't know I just play time'.
00:08:27
That means that he knows
the chords to the song
but doesn't have a set part
and just gonna walk over the changes.
00:08:34
Walking over the changes means that the
bass player is going to improvise a bass-line
based on the harmonic content of the song.
00:08:41
The good bass players
walk based on the
harmonic content of the song
and the lesser bass players
just walk.
00:08:46
Sometimes walk out of the gig.
00:08:49
Let's talk about the
expression 'Live room'.
00:08:52
And, 'Dead Room'.
00:08:54
One would think that Live Room
and Dead Room are related.
00:08:57
No,
they also have a distant cousin
called the 'Control Room'.
00:09:01
A Live Room is where you
put the musicians in a studio.
00:09:04
A Control Room is where you part
the engineers
and producers and the girls
that come with the producers
in the studio.
00:09:10
A Dead Room
is the part of the Live Room
that has no reflections.
00:09:14
So we have, the Live Room,
where we put the musicians,
the Control Room,
where we put the decision makers
and then we have the Dead Room
where we put people
who are too bright
and need to be deadened,
hence the Dead Room.
00:09:24
Let's talk about the expression
changes or rhythm changes.
00:09:28
As in:
'Hey dude, what do you wanna play?'
And the dude says: 'I don't know,
let's just play some changes.'
Changes is a contraction
of rhythm changes
which itself
is a contraction of
'I've got rhythm changes'.
00:09:39
As in the song 'I've got rhythm'.
00:09:42
Back in the day
'I've got rhythm' became a standard song
for jazz players to improvise upon.
00:09:47
Because the chord changes are cool,
it's and AABA form
and it's fun to play.
00:09:52
And when you get to the Bridge
you can do lots of cool things
and it's easy to memorize.
00:09:56
So, it became kind of a standard,
hence the name standard,
that the jazz players started playing on.
00:10:01
And so, instead of saying:
'Dude, should we play 'I've got rhythm?'
People will say:
'Hey, I'm gonna play rhythm changes.'
And then it became:
'Let's play changes.'
A lot of songs got written
on the changes of
'I've got rhythm'.
00:10:14
Hence, rhythm changes.
00:10:16
Let's talk about the expression
Counting Off.
00:10:18
I cannot count
on or off
the number of singers
who looked at me like
I was a dead fish when I said:
'Hey,
would you like to count off the song?'
They're like:
'Does it hurt?'
No, counting off is just
introducing the tempo of the song
to the musicians by counting it off.
00:10:36
Ah - One
Ah - Two,
Ah - one, two, three, four.
00:10:40
Let's talk about the word pedal.
00:10:43
We're not talking about guitar pedals,
you all know a lot about that,
no need to know any more about it.
00:10:49
What is a pedal?
A pedal is a classic music term
where in the harmony changes
of a piece,
say a Verse,
there's a constant
bass in changing chords.
00:11:00
So, a pedal in D minor,
for example,
would be D minor,
and then maybe
F over D (F/D)
and then maybe
something really tense
like Ab over D
but resolving to G minor over D.
00:11:13
So the D would be the pedal,
meaning, it stays throughout
the entire section
while the rest of the chords
change over it.
00:11:20
Sometimes people extend the
concept of pedal is in like:
'The verse is a D pedal'.
00:11:25
Meaning that it just
stays in D the whole time
and then you noodle around,
maybe tense it out a little bit.
00:11:31
Maybe you play a D minor
and then you're super
nerdy and play a fourth.
00:11:37
Let's talk about the
expression Chord Tones.
00:11:39
What are Chord Tones?
Technically Chord Tones are
the notes of the chord you're playing.
00:11:45
Play a C chord you have C, E and G.
00:11:47
Those are the 3 chord tones.
00:11:49
If you play a C7 chord you have a Bb,
those are your four chord tones.
00:11:53
Etc, etc.
00:11:54
So, when you communicate with a musician
and somebody plays a C
and you play an A
the arranger
might tell you:
'Dude, stick to the chord tones.'
Meaning, play what's inside the chord.
00:12:06
Let's talk about the
expression block chords.
00:12:08
Stay with me,
this one is smidgen trickier.
00:12:11
A block chord is a chord
or a voicing that is built
directly below the melody it refers to.
00:12:18
And if the melody moves
the chord moves with it.
00:12:22
The particularity of the block chord
is that it is very tight
very tight below the melody.
Say you're in C major
and your melody is an E,
your block chord under it
might be the C right below the E,
the G
and then the E an
octave below the original E.
00:12:37
So it's a very dense chord.
00:12:40
It's relevant if you
arrange a lot for ensembles,
say big bands,
you're gonna do a lot of chord
blocking or block chords
that follow the melody like this.
It's got a really cool sound.
00:12:50
If you do that you're
gonna have to learn drop 2,
when you drop the
second note an octave lower
so that you can give it to
a lower instrument.
00:12:57
And drop 2 and 4 where you drop the
second note and drop the fourth note
an octave lower so you can really go
all the way down, and give some work
to poor baritone players
who never get any work.
00:13:06
Let's talk about the word
Open Voicing.
00:13:09
Open Voicing is
the opposite of a block chord.
00:13:12
A block chord will be
as close together as
possible under the melody.
00:13:16
An open voicing will be
as spread apart as possible
under the melody.
00:13:20
Even above the melody, sometimes.
00:13:22
So the idea here is to have
as much of a spread as possible
from the low note to the
high note of the chord,
regardless of the inversion.
00:13:29
And torturing the inversion into
giving you that big span as possible.
00:13:34
Hence the name Open Voicing,
as wide open.
00:13:37
Let's talk about the word semitone.
00:13:39
What is a Semitone?
In theory a semitone is half a whole-tone
also known as a half-step.
00:13:46
In practice
the semitone is the sound of two
violin players trying to play unison.
00:13:51
Let's talk about the expression
Sit In.
00:13:54
As in:
'Hey dude, can I sit in on your gig?'
Remember gig?
OK.
00:13:58
That is an expression used
by jazz musicians
who will come on the second or
third set of somebody else's gig
and sit on a chair
on the band standing with him
and play.
00:14:07
If they are trombone
players they might stand
but the idea here is somebody
who comes in and joins another band
for a few songs, inpromptu
and usually plays the
longest possible solo
to feel good about
coming down to that gig.
00:14:18
Speaking of violins,
let's talk about the
expression string quartet.
00:14:22
What is a string quartet?
Well, for all intents and purposes,
a string quartet is comprised of
somebody who plays the violin
very very well,
somebody who plays the violin not
quite as well,
somebody who will never play
the violin very well
and somebody who hates violins.
00:14:37
Let's talk about the word Scat.
00:14:39
To scat or scatting
usually refers to a vocalist singing,
improvising
in the style of an instrument,
over a bunch of changes.
00:14:48
Usually in the jazz idiom
and it usually sounds something akin to...
00:14:57
You know?
Let's talk about the word Arrangement.
00:15:00
What is arranging?
What does an arranger do?
What's an arrangement?
Historically
and arranger would be
somebody who takes a song
and decide what the instruments will play.
For example,
you get 'Stella by Starlight'
and you have a big band.
00:15:15
Great. What the first alto is gonna play?
What the second alto is gonna play,
if you have two altos?
What the bass player is gonna play?
He may play time.
00:15:22
What the drummer is gonna play?
What the singer and
when are they gonna play?
How many bars of intro,
how many bars of outro?
That's an arrangement of a song.
00:15:30
The term has evolved.
00:15:31
These days
it's difficult to tell the difference
between the producer,
or beat maker,
and the arranger.
00:15:38
Basically arranging is
using an existing song
and putting music to it.
00:15:42
Deciding what the
instruments are gonna play to it
to make it an arrangement
so that the song can be
consumed by human beings.
00:15:49
Let's talk about the word
improvisation.
00:15:51
What is improvisation?
Very interesting.
00:15:54
A lot of people think
that improvisation is just
gibberish over a bunch of chords.
00:15:58
That's not what it is.
00:16:00
Improvisation is a vast
complicated language.
00:16:03
It is a language, meaning that
you have to learn the language
to be able to speak the language.
00:16:09
The best improvisers
don't pull stuff out of thin air.
00:16:12
They recombine a lot of words, and
sentences that they've learned and practiced
or invented themselves
and are able to pull them out
in real-time,
just like a freestyle rapper would do.
00:16:22
So, I would say improvisation is
the ancestor of freestyle rapping.
00:16:28
And then somebody
is gonna throw me a tomato.
00:16:30
Let's talk about the word Chart.
00:16:33
We're not talking about the
Billboard Charts
those are interesting but that's not
what we're talking about today.
00:16:37
We're talking about the
music chart,
usually used by orchestras or big bands.
00:16:42
The horn chart, the piano chart,
the bass chart.
00:16:45
It is the piece of paper
that has
each player's part printed upon.
00:16:48
The drum chart,
the bass chart, the piano chart.
00:16:51
For the singers sometimes you call
it a 'Lead Sheet'
because he's a leader and it's
a sheet of paper so Lead Sheet.
00:16:57
En français, on dit partition.
00:16:59
Let's talk about the word Head.
00:17:02
Head is a great word,
I love that word.
00:17:04
What is it in music?
In music Head can be two things:
'Let's play it from the head'.
That's the top of the song.
00:17:10
'Let's play the head.'
means: 'Let's play the song'.
00:17:14
'Let's play the theme of the song'.
00:17:16
In the jazz system
you play the head, which means,
the song, for example
'Stell by Starlight', 'Alone Together'
or whatever,
and you play the original
melody of the song
and then improvise over
the changes of the song.
00:17:28
The part where you play
the melody of the song
is called playing the head
and then you solo on top of that.
00:17:34
So either you play from the head,
which means you play the top of the song
or play the head, which means you
play the whole song, the theme of the song
and then you start improvising on top.
00:17:44
Let's talk about the word 'Pick up'.
00:17:47
I cannot count
the number of times where I've seen
conversations of the style:
'Hey Dude,
can you play a pick up to the verse?'
Other dude...
00:17:56
To palliate this grave problems
I shall educate you on pick up.
00:17:59
You may have heard of
apogiatura or grace note.
00:18:03
It's the note before the note.
00:18:04
So, instead of playing...
00:18:06
You play...
00:18:08
In extension,
a pick up is basically something
that you play before the thing
that you're picking up on.
00:18:13
So if you've got a
verse the pick up maybe...
00:18:16
So the 'pah dom' would be the pick up.
00:18:18
It's actually a little thing
that you play before the thing
sort of a thing for the thing.
00:18:24
Let's talk about the word 'Fill'.
00:18:26
The word fill is usually used
in association with
drummers or drum parts.
00:18:30
As in: 'Hey dude,
can you play a fill before the chorus?'
It is the part the drummer plays that
deviates
from the straight beat,
groove or pocket as we've learned.
00:18:40
For example...
00:18:44
That's a fill,
right? It's a call into the next part.
00:18:48
The way I see it,
a fill is the part where are kind
enough to let the drummer use his toms.
00:18:53
Let's talk about the word 'Break'.
00:18:55
Not as in 'Let's take a break'.
00:18:57
We never take a break.
00:18:58
But as in:
'Hey, can we play a break
after the third chorus?'
A break a deconstructed
arrangement part of a song, for example,
a chorus played again but without
the snare and the bass,
a smaller part,
like a respite from the full arrangement,
it's a break from the full arrangement
and it's called
a break.
00:19:16
If you're French and you
wanna confuse the rest of the world
you will call a fill a break.
00:19:20
So when you move to the USA
nobody understands anything
you say for the longest time.
00:19:25
We have talked about the word break,
we talked about the word beat.
00:19:29
Let's talk about the word Breakbeat.
00:19:30
What is a breakbeat?
Well a breakbeat is actually a sample
lifted from a record
that rap producers use
to make a new track out of.
00:19:40
And it's not a break
and it's not just a beat,
it's a breakbeat.
00:19:43
So it's closer to a beat to a break.
00:19:46
Let's talk about the word Drop.
00:19:48
Intuitively you might think
that the word drop
is kind of the same thing as a break,
as we talked about earlier,
but not at all.
00:19:56
It's not, as you would think,
when part of the song
drops off, that's not it.
00:20:01
The drop is a fixture
of modern EDM tracks.
00:20:04
You know when that thing climbs
and there's that 909 roll...
00:20:09
And after 4 bars you think
it's gonna drop, but it doesn't.
00:20:11
And then after 8 bars you think
it's gonna drop but it doesn't.
00:20:14
And after 16 bars
you think it's gonna happen
and it keeps climbing.
00:20:18
And then, you're deceived and deceived.
00:20:21
And after an insane amount of time
it drops and everything explodes.
00:20:25
That's the drop.
00:20:27
Let's talk about the expression
Turnaround.
What is a turnaround?
Technically a turnaround
is a cadence,
harmonic cadence at the
end of a section
to prepare the arrival of another section.
00:20:40
At the end of and AABA song form
of 32 bars the last A,
the last bar is Em7b5, A7#9.
00:20:49
That's sets you up really nicely
to come back to the top
on the Dm chord.
00:20:52
So, the Em7b5
A7#9 is the turnaround
back to Dm, if you will,
the overpass back to Dm.
00:21:01
It's a path back to where you wanna be
or back onto the next section,
hence the name, turnaround.
00:21:07
Let's talk about the word B section.
00:21:09
In theory,
B section is A section's best friend.
00:21:14
In practice B section can be used
for many things.
00:21:17
Basically,
whenever a song or a section of a song
has a section that is different enough
to be called another section
they tend to be called B sections.
00:21:26
So, for example,
you have a perfectly fine verse
and somebody goes to the relative minor
on bar 8 of a 10 bar verse,
they'll say: 'that's the B section'.
00:21:33
Because it's not strong
enough to be a pre-chorus
but it's too strong to still be called
a verse so they call it
the B section of the verse.
00:21:40
So basically it's a change in the verse.
00:21:42
And that's fine and well.
00:21:44
In the AABA section thing,
the B section is the B
section, so that's the name, B section.
00:21:51
But people tend to like to make
things confusing and annoying
so sometimes the word B section
can be interchangeable
with the word bridge.
00:21:58
Probably because of the AABA song form.
00:22:01
So basically,
to summarize,
B section is a section
that changes from the A section
and that's OK.
00:22:08
Let's talk about the word Riff,
like in Riff Raff
but without the Raff.
00:22:13
A riff is a musical phrase,
usually very catchy, hooky,
usually played on guitar
that is either the intro
or sometimes the entire body of a song.
00:22:24
As in most Rolling Stones songs.
00:22:26
'Hey, what's the guitar riff dude?'
That kind of stuff, that's a riff.
00:22:33
Let's talk about the word lick.
00:22:35
Just go see the word riff.
00:22:38
Let's talk about the word Vamp.
00:22:40
A vamp is the musical equivalent
of a Friday night hang with your friends.
00:22:44
It's a bunch of people that you know
and you get together
and nothing much happens
but you still do it every
Friday night.
00:22:50
The same thing with a vamp.
00:22:51
A vamp is a bunch of
chords and riffs or licks
that you know, that happen together
and just nothing happens.
Usually, at the end of a song,
it's a placeholder, it's kind of a
purgatory for something interesting.
00:23:02
For example:
'Hey dude what do we do after the third chorus?'
'Ah, just vamp on the chords'.
00:23:06
Until somebody tells you to stop.
00:23:08
Let's talk about the word Coda.
00:23:11
Anyone who took band in their
high-school years
knows what the coda is,
that's the part you miss every time.
00:23:17
Beat makers call it Outro.
00:23:19
Coda in Italian means tail.
00:23:21
The Coda is the end
of the song, the final piece,
the conclusion.
00:23:25
Let's talk about the word Tag.
00:23:27
The word tag is somewhat
interchangeable with the
word coda but not quite.
00:23:31
Because originally tag
was the end of a song,
the part you tag on at the end of a song
but since then it's moved up
into the song structure
and the tag can be
anything and attached to any section.
00:23:43
'Hey, we're gonna play a tag on that
chorus before we move on to the verse'.
00:23:46
So it's kind of like an interstitial,
an extra part
an appendance, and addendum
to the part that you played
just before, the tag.
00:23:53
Let's talk about the expression
Trading fours or trading eights.
00:23:58
That is a super jazzy expression
where in the solo part,
instead of having one
dude just blowing like crazy
over 32 bars of the AABA head
you have the drummer playing four bars
and then the tenor player plays 4 bars
and then drummer plays 4 bars,
the tenor plays 4 bars,
that's called Trading Fours.
00:24:16
You can also trade eights.
00:24:17
Sometimes they trade eights
and then trade fours and then trade
twos and then get back to the head.
00:24:22
And last but not least,
let's talk about the word
Tacet.
00:24:27
A word you probably haven't hear of
if you haven't played in
an orchestra or big band
or read an orchestra score
or a big band score.
00:24:34
In Latin the word tacet
means literally silent.
00:24:38
So when your arranger or your producer
or you the chart in front of you
tells you to be tacet
just shut the fuck up.
00:24:44
And now I'm gonna be tacet.
00:24:46
Et voilà!
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Fab Dupont is a award-winning NYC based record producer, mixing/mastering engineer and co-founder of pureMix.net.
Fab has been playing, writing, producing and mixing music both live and in studios all over the world. He's worked in cities like Paris, Boston, Brussels, Stockholm, London and New York just to name a few.
He has his own studio called FLUX Studios in the East Village of New York City.
Fab has received many accolades around the world, including wins at the Victoires de la Musique, South African Music awards, Pan African Music Awards, US independent music awards. He also has received Latin Grammy nominations and has worked on many Latin Grammy and Grammy-nominated albums.
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